Missing things

Reading this made me sad. I love the Web so much, like more than is probably sane and healthy for a non-human entity, but nearly every other good thing in my life has happened because of it. And that Web is going quickly, if not already gone. All good things… and all that, but it still fucking wrecks me.

I keep thinking about that.

Some of it, for me, is probably pure nostalgia for things from when I was younger, and I’d feel the same about other stuff from years ago — friends, places, events, etc.

And some of it is missing things that shouldn’t exist any more, like the small, relatively homogenous, world of the early web. It was nice, it was ours, it was different, but it was always, rightly, going to grow and change.

And some of it is missing things that were exciting because they were new and unusual, almost unbelievable — “I’m typing at someone in America and they’re writing back immediately!”. Expecting that to still be exciting would be too much.

But some of it is missing attitudes and activities and virtual places that have gone, or that might as well have gone. Some have vanished, others have become so diluted among the vastness and variety of the modern internet that they can have little impact on us. Everything’s so quick and immediate, splintered among hundreds and thousands of friends, contacts and “friends”. So many more things — sites, services, headlines, apps, alerts, groups — competing for our time and attention. There’s less room, comparatively, for the amateur. Less room for the non-commercial. For the slow conversations. For the feeling of being away from “the real world”.